The biggest debt is always the government debt; it's always debt that government has run up on your behalf.

Now I can see how that can happen. You can fall in love with anybody--a fool, a criminal, a nothing. There are no good rules.

The temptation is to stay inside; to subside into the kind of recluse whom neighborhood children regard with derision and little awe; to let the hedges and weeds grow up, to allow the doors to rust shut, to lie on my bed in some gown-shaped garment and let my hair lengthens and spread out over the pillow and my fingernails to sprout into claws, while candle wax drips onto the carpet. But long ago I made a choice between classicism and romanticism. I prefer to be upright and contained—an urn in daylight.

Reading ... changes you. You aren't the same person after you've read a particular book as you were before, and you will read the next book, unless both are Harlequin Romances, in a slightly different way.

Speculative fiction encompasses that which we could actually do. Sci-fi is that which we're probably not going to see.

Every aspect of human technology has a dark side, including the bow and arrow.

We love each other, that’s true whatever it means, but we aren’t good at it; for some it’s a talent, for others only an addiction.